Her voice becomes energised as she begins to talk about the education gap in indigenous Australia and the need for greater governmental and public attention. It is clear her role as school principal of Worawa is not a job, it's a passion. She's not just a principal – she's also her students' elder, with the responsibility of nurturing their Aboriginal identity.

Worawa teacher Leigh Waters says Ms Peeler's word carries weight in the minds of the students, which she as an ordinary teacher does not have. "She's an elder of the Yorta Yorta people – she's not the elder of all these girls, but when they come together onto one place, and this is Worawa place, she is their elder – she is their aunty."

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Ms Peeler considers herself blessed to have grown up in an environment where her Aboriginality was nurtured, but she says many Aboriginal children these days are uncomfortable in their identity and lack pride in it.

"Families are holding on to our culture and language in the best way they can, but society has changed," she says. "Everybody is out there doing different things and there's not the ability to maintain your family links and your cultural links."

Laurel Robinson (left) and her sister Lois Peeler, the Sapphires, in the 1960s.

Ms Peeler's sister, the late Hyllus Maris, founded Worawa in Frankston in 1989. Consistent with her sister's vision, she says Worawa is "not just Aboriginal kids in a school that caters for Aboriginal kids – it's an Aboriginal school".

The boarding school is for students from years 7 to 10, girls from some of Australia's most remote regions, many of whom have been exposed to trauma and dysfunction in their communities, including a lack of motivation to attend school. To cater for the breadth and depth of students' needs, Ms Peeler has pioneered a holistic approach to education that colleagues say is unparalleled.

Worawa has its own wellbeing counsellor, psychologist, nurse, a weekly visiting GP and will soon have a chaplain. Students are trained in mindfulness, relaxation and meditation, and quiet rooms are available if students become agitated. A group of academics has written the curriculum and a council of Aboriginal elders steers the cultural program.

The school has numerous partnerships with local schools, including some of Melbourne's leading private schools. Ms Peeler says she has approached these links with caution, ensuring every event or program is truly two-way.

She takes care to ensure the school doesn't become a "goldfish bowl" for other schools to "come and look at the Aboriginal kids", which she says happened a lot in the past.

Marnie O'Bryan, who led the indigenous program at Melbourne's Scotch College, says partnerships such as the one between Worawa and Scotch help put a conversation about national identity on the public radar.

"She's had to demand that white Australia take note of wider perspectives, and I think she should be given enduring respect for what she does," Ms O'Bryan says.

Ms Peeler

grew up surrounded by family members, particularly women, who led the fight for Aboriginal citizenship and improvements to health, housing and education. "Fortunately, we had a very strong nanna," she says. "We had two strong nannas. So we didn't have much choice but to be strong black women."

Three of her maternal grandmother's four children were taken, Ms Peeler's aunts, and the family was only reunited as adults. Ms Peeler's mother, the late Geraldine Briggs AO, was a leader in the Aboriginal community and as a youth took part in the Yorta Yorta people's Cummeragunja protest walk-off in 1939.

As the Sapphires soundtrack plays in the background, Ms Peeler tells how the term "sapphire" is used in black American jargon to describe a strong, feisty woman. "That name is quite appropriate, you know, being involved in the Aboriginal struggle and meeting challenges head on."

An intensely private person, few of her contemporary colleagues knew about her stage career before the film was released, and it refers to aspects of her life that she doesn't discuss in public. Details about her husband and children are off-limits, although she does confirm that the romance with an American GI, depicted in the film, was part of her life. The film was not intended to be strictly biographical but Ms Peeler says there were some parts that clearly took "artistic licence". In one scene, Kay, the character loosely based on Ms Peeler, averts a potentially dangerous confrontation with Vietcong soldiers by speaking her native language. She confirms they did come face to face with the enemy but they got out of it in a different way. "We gave them cigarettes and booze," she says with a wry smile.

Colleagues know Ms Peeler to be pragmatic in her approach to business and are not surprised she wasn't one of those complaining about the cover art on the US release of the Sapphires, which was criticised as being racist and sexist.

Irish male lead Chris O'Dowd is positioned front and centre in the image, with the four Aboriginal female actors faded into the background. It's just common sense, she says, because most Americans wouldn't have known who Jessica Mauboy or Deborah Mailman were. "The marketers, who have more expertise than I do in that field, knew what they were doing," she says. Besides that, the film's message is more important to her than its cover art.

"We were young Aboriginal women – OK, take out Aboriginal – we were young women who went to a war zone in the '60s at a time of political change on a global scale and there was a lot of racism going on, there was segregation going on," she says.

"And we went over there, so it was kind of ground-breaking."

Almost half a century later, Ms Peeler knows more than most how much prejudice still exists in mainstream Australia.

"I think there are still pockets out there in the broader community – and that's been shown more recently with other races. But let's face it – there are people out there who think that if you're not WASP [white Anglo-Saxon Protestant], then you shouldn't be here."

She considers the treatment of the asylum seeker issue by politicians "abominable" but says she's reluctant to fully express her political views on the matter. "We've got our own Aboriginal people out in remote communities that have nothing, nothing."